their
saucers. Twelve hundred years ago, a Chinese scholar by the name of Lo Yu
wrote of tea, "It tempers the spirits and harmonizes the mind, dispels
lassitude and relieves fatigue, awakens thought and prevents drowsiness,
lightens and refreshes the body, and clears the perceptive faculties." Our
own observation is that there is nothing that so loosens the hinge of the
tongue, soothes the temper, exhilarates the diaphragm, kindles sociality
and makes the future promising. Like one of the small glasses in the wall
of Barnum's old museum, through which you could see cities and mountains
bathed in sunshine, so, as you drink from the tea-cup, and get on toward
the bottom so that it is sufficiently elevated, you can see almost anything
glorious that you want to. We had a great-aunt who used to come from town
with the pockets of her bombazine dress standing way out with nice things
for the children, but she would come in looking black as a thunder cloud
until she had got through with her first cup of tea, when she would empty
her right pocket of sugarplums, and having finished her second cup would
empty the other pocket, and after she had taken an extra third cup, because
she felt so very chilly, it took all the sitting-room and parlor and
kitchen to contain her exhilaration.

Be not surprised if, after your friends are seated at the table, the style
of the conversation depends very much on the kind of tea that the housewife
pours for the guests. If it be genuine Young Hyson, the leaves of which are
gathered early in the season, the talk will be fresh, and spirited, and
sunshiny. If it be what the Chinese call Pearl tea, but our merchants have
named Gunpowder, the conversation will be explosive, and somebody's
reputation will be killed before you get through. If it be green tea,
prepared by large infusion of Prussian blue and gypsum, or black tea mixed
with pulverized black lead, you may expect there will be a poisonous effect
in the conversation and the moral health damaged. The English Parliament
found that there had come into that country two million pounds of what the
merchants call "lie tea," and, as far as I can estimate, about the same
amount has been imported into the United States; and when the housewife
pours into the cups of her guests a decoction of this "lie tea," the group
are sure to fall to talking about their neighbors, and misrepresenting
everything they touch. One meeting of a "sewing society" up in Canada,